Why is China Highlighting Militias in State Owned Enterprises?

China experts tell VOA that there may be more to the ministry's confirmation than meets the eye. At the Defense Ministry's once-a-month briefing on Oct. 26, spokesperson Wu Qian said the effort was part of China's whole-nation approach to national defense and that the militias are available for everything from a large-scale mobilization to the response to a natural disaster. China's reliance on militias peaked during the turbulent rule of Mao Zedong when there were more than 30 million militia members nationwide. In the 1980s, when China shifted to focus more on reform and the building of its economy, the numbers began to shrink to around 8 million, according to an article published in Beijing's Xinjingbao in December 2011, citing Defense Ministry sources. June Teufel Dreyer, a political scientist and China specialist at the University of Miami, sees the move as an effort to tighten the Chinese Communist Party's grip over SOEs. Last December, China saw nationwide protests over its draconian COVID-19 lockdowns, the scale of which the country has not seen since the Tiananmen and nationwide protests in 1989, which led to a bloody crackdown. A chapter in Shaanxi province's archive explained how government-sponsored militias were put to work in a crisis such as the outbreak of nationwide pro-democracy protests in 1989, which led to the June 4 Tiananmen massacre and killings and arrests of suspected activists throughout China.